The first use of olives in Africa around 100,000 years ago.

The olive tree was an iconic plant for most of the past Mediterranean civilizations, for which it had important economic value. Here we report the earliest use of fruits and wood from olive trees in Africa so far, around 100,000 years ago. These findings suggest the presence of olive trees on the Atlantic coast of Morocco during most of the last glacial period, and the use of olives by the early Homo sapiens for fuel management and most probably for consumption.

A cost-effective high-throughput metabarcoding approach powerful enough to genotype ~44 000 year-old rodent remains from Northern Africa.

We present a cost-effective metabarcoding approach, aMPlex Torrent, which relies on an improved multiplex PCR adapted to highly degraded DNA, combining barcoding and next-generation sequencing to simultaneously analyse many heterogeneous samples. We demonstrate the strength of these improvements by generating a phylochronology through the genotyping of ancient rodent remains from a Moroccan cave whose stratigraphy covers the last 120 000 years. Rodents are important for epidemiology, agronomy and ecological investigations and can act as bioindicators for human- and/or climate-induced environmental changes. Efficient and reliable genotyping of ancient rodent remains has the potential to deliver valuable phylogenetic and paleoecological information. The analysis of multiple ancient skeletal remains of very small size with poor DNA preservation, however, requires a sensitive high-throughput method to generate sufficient data. We show this approach to be particularly adapted at accessing this otherwise difficult taxonomic and genetic resource. As a highly scalable, lower cost and less labour-intensive alternative to targeted sequence capture approaches, we propose the aMPlex Torrent strategy to be a useful tool for the genetic analysis of multiple degraded samples in studies involving ecology, archaeology, conservation and evolutionary biology.

Identifying predation on rodent teeth through structure and composition: A case from Morocco.

Predation by nocturnal birds of prey is one of the most frequent modes leading to the concentration of rodents in fossil assemblages. This mode of accumulation leaves characteristic surface alterations on bones and teeth. In order to evaluate and characterize the effects of these pre-diagenesis alterations on rodent fossil samples, we have carried out microstructural and chemical analyses on incisors collected from present day Moroccan wild animals and owl pellets. The microstructure of both dentine and enamel was well preserved, but chemical changes were evident in pellet samples and depended on the particular tissue and the nature of the predator. The comparison of compositional data obtained from electron microprobe chemical analyses and infrared spectrometry has allowed us to assign a possible predator to an incisor extracted from a pellet of an unknown origin. This method has further implications for the understanding of taphonomy and palaeoecology of archaeological and fossil sites.